


A Haunting at Monmouth Manufacturing

by Partypizzaparty



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 06:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14611500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Partypizzaparty/pseuds/Partypizzaparty
Summary: There’s a ghost at Monmouth Manufacturing, and it’s not Noah.





	1. Chapter 1

“I think,” Richard Campbell Gansey the Third declared, all serious eyebrows and serious set to his jaw and serious salmon polo shirt, “we are being haunted.”

This was met with silence from Blue Sargent, Noah Czerny, and Adam Parrish, and silence and a withering look from Ronan Lynch.

“No shit, Gansey,” Ronan replied eventually, “He’s standing right behind you.”

They all looked over at Noah, the only one of the assembled who was dead. Noah looked wounded. Well, technically, he looked extra-wounded, the ever-present smudge on his cheek coupled with an even more piteous expression than usual. “I can hear you, you know,” he said.

“Not to be repetitive, but no fucking shit,” Ronan said.

“You didn’t say ‘fucking’ the first time,” Noah pointed out. “So it’s not technically repetitive.”

Gansey ignored them both and clarified, “And I don’t mean by Noah.”

Blue sat with her back against the pool table, peeling sparkly blue nail polish off her fingers and depositing the chips into a small pile on the floor. She waved away Ronan’s raven Chainsaw who was eying the shiny chips with undisguised longing, and looked up at Gansey inquisitively.

Adam, stretched out on the leather couch with the back of his arm covering his eyes, didn’t move, but murmured, “I wouldn’t really call what we have with Noah a haunting anyway. More like a _mortuus amicus._ No, wait, I mean an _amicus mortuus_ , I think.”

“A _fucking fidelius frater_?” Ronan offered.

Noah looked pleased, but still wounded – that smudge from the skateboard never really disappeared - and Blue chimed in to reassure him.

“Whatever they said, probably, but not a haunting. I know hauntings, and they usually involve seriously creepy things, not, uh...just mildly creepy ones.”

“Where’s the line between seriously creepy and mildly creepy?” Noah asked. He wasn’t usually interested in questions about his afterlife, but he did get tired of being called creepy, so it couldn’t hurt to know...

Gansey was aware he was losing control of the room. “As I was saying,” he declared, as Ganseys in general were wont to declarations, “I don’t mean Noah, unless he has certain proclivities that he has not shared with us. I am talking about last night, when I was getting dressed after a shower, and heard what could only be described as...a giggle.”

“A _female_ giggle,” Gansey added, when the others didn’t show the appropriate amount of interest in his revelation.

“If I were you,” Ronan said acidly, “I wouldn’t share the fact that girls laugh when you take off your clothes.”

Gansey had the briefest urge to say that girls would be very impressed with his nakedness, thankyouverymuch, but quickly suppressed it and instead said calmly, “Ronan. Now unless you had a lady over last night, which seems unlikely, it seems that the explanation must fall in the realm of the supernatural. Since three of you are experts in the supernatural yourselves, and Jane knows all about those kinds of things too, I thought you might...” Gansey trailed off as he noticed Blue’s eyebrows drawing threateningly together under her haphazard bangs.

“Excuse me,” Blue said, letting her Henrietta drawl put about seven hundred extra “u”s in ‘excuse’, “but exactly what sort of things do you think I’m specifically not an expert in?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Gansey said, in the guilty and pained voice that only Blue and Adam seemed capable of wringing from him, “It’s just... Let me start again... Jane, I know you know a lot about spirits, ghosts, supernatural phenomena...”

“Emasculating men,” Ronan cut in, only to be rewarded with a poisonous look from Blue and a sigh from Gansey.

“Enough, Ronan. The point is that last night I heard a voice whispering and laughing when there was no one else around, and if that doesn’t sound like a ghost to you, I’d like to hear other possible explanations. And if it does sound like a ghost, well, I’d still like an explanation.”

“Whispering?” Blue asked. “You didn’t mention that the first time. What was she saying?”

“Well, I -ah- couldn’t really make out the words,” Gansey said, as the tips of his ears turned the same color salmon as his popped polo collar. Ronan started laughing, loudly and wickedly.

“Oh come on,” Adam exclaimed, sitting up in one quick motion, sending Chainsaw fluttering, and startling them all, “Noah, do you know what he means?” He was tired and sore after school and work and school and Cabeswater and more school and work, and just wanted to steal 15 minutes of sleep on this possibly magical couch, whose overstuffed cushions and buttery leather sucked him in and threatened never to let him get up again, but that would obviously never happen until Gansey got his answer.

“Noah?” Adam demanded again, looking around the room.

But Noah was gone.

********************  
Gansey was in DC at a gala, Noah was MIA, Kavinsky was dead, and Ronan needed company. He was bored. He was restless. He was _horny_ , an annoying little voice in his mind corrected as he studiously ignored it.

It had been a long time, but when he still lived in the dorms, he’d had a thing.

He’d been standing in the back of a local evangelical church’s combination gymnasium/fellowship hall/Starbucks, listening as a pan-denominational choir of kids including Matthew cheerfully butchered Christmas carols. He had just started wondering to himself how anyone could possibly forget the words to “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” when a voice beside him remarked, “They really are quite terrible, aren’t they?”

Ronan instinctively clenched his hands into fists and turned to defend his brother from this stranger, but when he recognized Thomas, a big blond guy who lived in the dorm beside his, he relaxed.

“I can’t help wondering what our Lord and Saviour did to deserve this,” Thomas continued, sighing deeply and slowly shaking his head. “That ginger one on the end is my cousin. I fear that his future successes do not lie in the realm of musical arts. So shall we go for a smoke?”

Ronan didn’t smoke, but as the choir began picking up tambourines and sleigh bells, and the choir director turned to the audience with a maniacal grin and said, “Now we need your help on this next one!” he decided it was past time to get the hell out of there.

Thomas turned out to be a happy, artistic guy who loved painting, making out with Ronan, and smoking weed. He really, really loved smoking weed. Ronan got high with him once or twice, but usually he just watched as Thomas smoked a spliff out the dorm window, then pulled his shirt off and with a vacant smile, dropped onto the twin bed beside Ronan.

For a brief time, Ronan thought he might be in love, but when Thomas decided to transfer to an art school in Amsterdam, Ronan wasn’t really sure whether he was sad or relieved. And then Niall Lynch died, and Ronan’s libido did the same.

Though he would never admit it, there were many drunken nights when he was sure that Niall had been killed because Ronan had sinned, and the Lord was enacting some cruel, homophobic revenge. Other nights, he was sure his father’s death happened because Declan was a manwhore, or more likely, because Niall himself was an abomination overflowing with unholy dreams, but the nights when he was torn between remembering Tom’s warm touch and those Leviticus verses were the ones that really stuck with him.

They left him mired in a life of simultaneously self-righteous and self-loathing chastity, made easier by the fact that Gansey seemed to be too focused on Glyndower to concern himself with matters of the flesh. Well, he had seemed that way until Blue, anyway. But what about the whole Blue and Adam thing? What was up with that bullshit?

‘Adam,’ Ronan thought, shaken from his reverie about ghosts of hookups past by the obvious fact that while Gansey and Noah were unavailable, Adam was definitely around somewhere. He should go see Adam.

*************

A few hours later, Ronan accidentally-on-purpose drove by the garage Adam worked at, and when he saw Parrish’s Hondayota, he pulled onto the sad, grassy field beside the cinderblock building and slipped inside.

Adam was bent over an engine, humming along with some terrible hair metal song that was playing on the radio, his t-shirt riding up just enough to show a few inches of freckled skin above his waistband. Ronan took a minute to admire the view, enjoying the rare opportunity to look without any chance of being caught.

In the midst of Ronan’s appreciation, Adam whipped around, loudly said, “Who’s there?” and promptly smashed his head against the light that was hanging on the car’s open hood. He let loose with a word one normally didn’t hear from Adam Parrish, and clapped his grease-stained hand to his forehead, before seeing Ronan and sighing.

A trickle of blood seeped from below his palm as he stepped towards the workbench and began rooting through its contents. “Jesus, Lynch,” Adam said after he found a somewhat-clean towel to staunch the blood and turned around to face the other boy. “Was there something you wanted, or are you just here to scare me into grievous bodily harm?”

“Oh come on, Parrish,” Ronan shot back. “It’s just a scratch. And it’s not my fault you’re such a fucking pussy. You’re supposed to be the human manifestation of a mystical million-year-old forest or whatever.”

When Adam didn’t argue, Ronan was strangely disappointed. His blood was thrumming through his body, hot and ready for a fight, but Adam just lowered the towel and inspected the stain on it while probing the wound with his fingers to see if the bleeding had stopped. Thanks to Declan, Ronan had had head wounds of his own before, and they bled like hell, but he knew they weren’t usually serious. Well, except when they were, he corrected himself, remembering that not long ago, Adam could hear from both ears.

“Again, was there something you wanted?” Adam asked.

“I just thought if you’re bored,” Ronan said, “we could have a stakeout and look for Gansey’s ghost.”

Adam took a minute to reply, his jaw muscle twitching as he methodically wiped the grease off his hands with the stained towel. “Ronan, I know this is hard for you to understand, but I’m not bored. I’m working.”

Ronan felt like an asshole. Academically, he knew he was an asshole most of the time, but it usually made him feel powerful and untouchable, not shitty. This was a shitty asshole feeling, and he didn’t like it.

“After, then. You’re almost off, right?”

“An hour and a half.”

“I’ll still be up.”

“What’s this really about, Ronan?”

“Creepy fucking dead girls watching me piss.”

“Fine. I’ll come by after.”

****  
Ronan had taken a shower, shaved, and changed the newspaper in Chainsaw’s cage. He had also ordered Chinese, and when they refused to deliver to Monmouth because they only delivered to homes, not seemingly-abandoned factories, he actually drove to the restaurant and picked the order up, arriving home just in time to see the Hondayota pulling out of Monmouth’s parking lot.

He pulled up beside the pathetic four-wheeled motorfuckery, rolled his window down, and when Adam did the same, threw a pair of chopsticks through the opening, narrowly missing Adam’s already injured head. “Honey, I’m home,” he smirked, then peeled the BMV into the lot, knowing that Adam would turn around and follow. And of course, he did.

******  
At first, there was only the sound of Adam wolfing down containers of sesame chicken and rice, two egg rolls, and two cans of Coke, while Ronan picked at the only thing on the menu that had five chili peppers next to it and nursed a bottle of beer. Once Adam seemed to be slowing down, Ronan abandoned all pretense of eating and disappeared into his room, coming back with an armful of thick, half-melted white pillar candles with heavy brass rings on the tops.

“Borrowed them from the sacristy,” he said matter-of-factly. “Figured using blessed candles might make the seance easier.”

Adam finished swallowing his fortune cookie and asked, “Is that what we’re doing then? A seance?”

“You know of a better way to talk to ghosts? I didn’t ask you over for a fucking tea party, man.”

“That’s too bad.” said a voice from the shadows. “I used to love tea. Chai tea. Green tea. Long Island Iced Tea.” Noah slumped over to them and flopped soundlessly on the floor near where Ronan was arranging the candles in what probably should have been a pentagram, but what looked more like an amoeba.

“Good to see you, Noah,” Adam said. “Are you sure you want to be here for this?”

“This is my home, and I’m not having any stupid _ghost_ taking it from me,” he replied with surprising vehemence. It was hard to read Noah’s facial expressions, what with him not technically having a face, but if pressed to describe it, Ronan would probably go with “pissed off.” The Aglionby part of his brain argued that maybe he meant indignant, or truculent, or in a fit of pique, but none of those were quite right. Noah was _pissed. off._

“I didn’t know ghosts were territorial,” Ronan said, “I better not find you pissing on the couch.” He was thinking of the cat Niall Lynch brought home one day for Matthew. Unlike the dozens of barn cats wandering around the Barns, this small white kitten was supposedly some kind of genius purebreed, and Niall talked about like it was the cure for cancer. It spent its time viciously attacking Ronan’s ankles whenever he walked by, chewing through pair after pair of his shoes, and pissing on his bed. Matthew had named it Sweetie. Ronan privately referred to it as Bear Bait.

Noah ignored Ronan’s dig and ran his gaze across the candles, all of which caught flame instantly.

Ronan hissed and pulled back the hand that had just been burned. “Fuck, Noah!” he exclaimed.

“Sorry,” Noah replied, but he looked nowhere near apologetic. “Also, Blue’s here, so someone should go let her in. Actually, never mind. If I wait for you two to make a move, I’ll be waiting forever.”

Noah glanced at the door, which flew open, and sure enough, there stood Blue, poised to knock on a door that had exploded away from her knuckles.

“Okay,” said Noah, and his firm voice was nothing like the boy they knew, who disappeared at the slightest hint of fear. “It’s time.”

Blue came inside without comment, and the group arranged themselves in a circle interspersed with the candles. Chainsaw flew into the room, probably hoping for more sparkly nail polish from Blue, but when none was to be found, she perched on Ronan’s shoulder and pulled her head down into her neck. This was not how Ronan had imagined the night going. Adam, yes. The candlelight, yes. His best friend’s secret girlfriend, bird feathers jabbing him in the ear, and a dead boy, not so much.

They all looked at each other awkwardly, until again -surprisingly- Noah took the lead. “Oh, miraculous and unknowable spirit world, please tell your meek and loyal servant - who haunts this place?” His voice was louder and more commanding than Ronan had ever heard it.

It was met with silence.

Then there was a sound. A snorting, choking sound. Adam and Ronan spun around and looked out into the shadowy factory floor behind them, before realizing the the sound was coming from the circle itself.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Blue finally managed through her laughter. “But, ‘Oh miraculous and unknowable spirit world’? It’s just so…” She dissolved into a very unappealing mix of giggles and snorts again.

If anyone else had responded in this way, Ronan was sure Noah would have blinked out of existence due to embarrassment, but because it was Blue, he just ducked his head self-consciously and said, “So what should I have said, then?”

“Who remains here, unable or unwilling to rest?” The voice was calm, collected and female. Blue stopped laughing, and joined the others in looking around the large room.

“Now, it’d be good if the one who I saw washin’ up before was here, but I reckon y’all will have to do.”

A pretty girl in a ruffled dress was reclining on the couch behind them, staring at the ceiling, and tapping her foot to a song only she could hear.

“I mean, finally!” she said, tilting her head to look at them. “I’ve been waiting forever. Well, I s’pose it’s only been a century or two. Time’s hard to track when you’re dead, as I’m sure you know.”


	2. Chapter 2

The ghost’s name was Josephine. 

She was “twenty or there abouts,” and as a child, her “fool father” had moved her entire family down to Virginia after his businesses in New York City and Philadelphia had both failed. 

“So after the Great War, my uncle and cousins made a bit of money and my father went to join them. If we stayed up North, I’d have been a schoolteacher, but in these parts, teaching jobs were white-only, so that’s how I landed up a secretary for Willem Schmit, owner of Monmouth Metalworks.”

Ronan, Adam, Noah and Blue were all unselfconsciously staring at Josephine as she told her story. Chainsaw was unselfconsciously staring at the large, sparkly brooch affixed to her top.

“Things went well for awhile,” Josephine continued, “but then Mister Schmit kept calling me into his office, and not just for dictating…To water his plants, to read his messages out loud...Then one day, he tried to get fresh with me. “

“He said that I should be glad that an important man like him paid me any mind, and that most wouldn’t bother. When I ran out of that office, he hollered after me that I’d be sorry.”

“The next day, as all the workers were leaving, he called me into his office again. He said if I told anyone about what he’d done, no one would believe a whore like me, and when I said, ‘I beg your pardon, but they most certainly will!’ he choked me and then threw me into a vat of molten steel.”

Blue gasped loudly, and Adam and Noah’s faces contorted in the flickering candle light.

“I don’t get why you went back,” Ronan remarked, unimpressed.”You should have told him to shove it up his ass and got a job somewhere else.”

“I thought you were Irish?” Josephine asked, eyeing Ronan. “You’d think you’d know better, unless you’re as foolish as you look.”

Ronan didn’t dignify this with a response.

*******

“Miss Josephine, are you here? My name is Gansey, and I’d like to speak with you if it isn’t too much trouble.”

Gansey had flawlessly executed all the tasks a Senate-hopeful could ask of her son, and had gotten back to Monmouth a whole night earlier than expected. When he heard about the seance and Josephine, he immediately called Adam and Blue and asked them to come to Monmouth. Now he, Blue, Ronan, Adam, and Noah were sitting in a circle on the living room floor, with the pilfered candles again flickering.

“Miss Josephine?” Gansey repeated.

“Oh, I think we’re beyond ‘Mister’ and ‘Miss’, Dick,” Josephine said, suddenly appearing on the couch and leering at Gansey in what Blue felt was a distinctly un-historical-lady-like way.

“Yes, well...Thank you for being willing to talk to me. I think it’s very brave, what you did.”

“Oh, there was no bravery involved. You see, I was engaged to James Howard. Big brown eyes, played the piano….We were so in love. I would never have touched Mister Schmits’ sad and spotty old body when I knew what was waiting for me. As if!”

“As if?” Gansey echoed uncertainly..

“Oh, was that not right?” Josephine asked. “That baldy one was watching a movie last night,” she said, pointing to Ronan, “and I joined him. It was quite amusing. I believe it was called Clue-”

“This is fucking. insane.” Ronan said loudly.

Blue smiled like her birthday had come early, while Adam, Gansey, and Noah looked confused. Josephine waved away Ronan’s furious sputtering and swearing. “He knows what I mean,” she said, pointing at Ronan and winking. “He also likes it when they’re good with their hands. Right, Irish?”

For the first time in eighteen years, Ronan was speechless. Something had short-circuited in his brain, triggered by Adam hearing a goddamn ghost saying he was into guys who were good with their hands. He couldn’t even remember any swear words - even the innocuous, elementary-school ones. He couldn’t think what to do with his hands - another problem he’d never had in the last almost-two decades - and eventually ran one roughly over his buzzed scalp while clenching and unclenching the other on his thigh.

Blue watched Ronan’s movements with a furrowed brow, but the others were still transfixed by Josephine. The ghost continued staring levelly at Ronan, until he finally stood up, kicked over a candle, said “I’ve got better shit to do than to talk to dead assholes. Come on, Noah. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” and left, slamming the door so hard one of Gansey’s cereal box buildings fell over.

*********

Gansey was in DC again, and though Adam had been invited, the latter had declined in order to work double doubles at the factory and garage to pay for the last of his college applications. Although Ronan knew this was the responsible choice, he couldn’t help noticing it was also the shitty one, and spent most of the weekend brooding about how often “responsible” and “shitty” were synonymous.

He was in a bad mood. He should go see Adam.

************

Ronan was holding a bottle of beer by its neck, and was stalking back and forth in front of the Hondayota. 

“Ronan.” Adam said flatly, drawing near to his car. He was exhausted, and just wanted to get back to the pathetic room above the church and pass out. Instead, he had a furious and probably drunk Ronan Lynch blocking the way to his escape.

“This bitch!” the Ronan in question said, continuing a conversation that had been started well before Adam showed up. “She just shows up and thinks she can… And then… It’s fucked, man.” He kicked his motorcycle boot at a dandelion, missed, and nearly fell over.

“Ronan, I’ve worked 32 out of the last 48 hours. I can’t right now. I need to sleep. Are you drunk? Do you need a ride home?” Adam’s Henrietta drawl was out in front of God and everyone, but he couldn’t seem to find the energy to care.

“She doesn’t even know what she’s fucking…” Ronan threw his bottle at the factory wall, and watched it shatter in a satisfying way. “And fucking Gansey and goddamn Sargent,” he continued, nonsensically.

“Come on,” Adam sighed. “I’ll take you home.”

And he did. They left the BMW in the lot, and drove silently, the street lights casting stripes across Ronan’s head which leaned against the window with eyes closed. When Adam pulled into Monmouth’s lot, shifted into park and waited for Ronan to get out, he didn’t. He just continued leaning his forehead against the Hondayota’s door.

“Ronan!” Adam said sharply. “Remember that part about how I need sleep? I meant that. And you need to go sleep it off.”

“She’s watching me, Adam,” Ronan said, blearily turning to meet his eyes. “Can you just stay and make sure…” Ronan trailed off so that Adam wasn’t sure what he was asking him to be sure of, but he was exhausted, and he knew that by the time he’d convinced Ronan to go upstairs, the three-minute drive to the church would feel more like three hours. So Adam said, “Come on, Lynch,” and headed into the building, with Ronan following behind.

“Noah?” Adam called when they walked into Monmouth Manufacturing. There was no answer.

Ronan lurched drunkenly against Adam, fisting his hand in Adam’s faded t-shirt and almost causing both to lose their balance. “See if she’s here,” Ronan slurred into Adam’s good ear. “I bet she’s watching right now and…” he trailed off again, his chin pressing harder on Adam’s shoulder, as if it was the only thing holding him up.

“Josephine?” Adam said. “Are you here?”

Again, there was no answer, but this apparently didn’t satisfy Ronan. “Probably in my fucking closet,” he said bitterly.

“I think ghosts are usually under your bed, not in your closet,” Adam said quietly.

“Not mine,” Ronan said darkly.

Adam let that pass. Despite the bone-deep exhaustion that dragged at him, he managed to get Ronan to pull off his jeans and to flop into his bed, as Chainsaw clucked approvingly. 

“Sleep, Lynch,” Adam whispered, pulling the sheet over him before pulling Ronan’s door shut and completely giving himself over to that indecently comfortable couch in Monmouth’s main room. The leather was just as welcoming and calming as he’d thought it would be, and Adam soon was quietly snoring.


End file.
